• Home
• About
• Contact
• Articles
• Ming
• Mission

What's Up With Ming

"Did you ever feel like an alien who somehow became stranded on a planet called Earth where nothing seemed to make any sense?" A quote from "Ming The Merciless"

Civilization Rehab

Recovering from civilization can be brutal but neccessary if we are to become truly free from it's influence. Kick the civilization habit here!

Being Human

The Condition Of Our ConditionArticles on the Human condition and how we might improve it.

The Centered Mind (cont)

After some trial and training, we believe that the ability to be aware/conscious on more than one level at the same time, though this capability is not currently widespread in most Humans today, can be developed.

In fact, we now believe that the development of this capability is critical to being aware of what we are thinking and saying and doing, when we are thinking and saying and doing it.

This doesn't make defining the characteristics of the centered mind any easier, and in fact we seem to be creating greater and greater challenges for ourselves with each new thought or idea. However, this may be just what is required and necessary in order to get where we're going.

As to the question of whether we can be emotional and unemotional at the same time, we admit to asking a dumb question. A well developed consciousness would evaluate the circumstances and the situation and determine whether being emotional was appropriate, and if so, it would not restrict it's expression.

The same applies to situations where being physical is appropriate, which makes this more an issue of energy management than a matter of experience. That is; where and when to allocate the systems resources, such as providing the energy and support for the other domains to carry out their functions, and this certainly would fall within the conscious mind's area of responsibility. And, once it's duties are fulfilled, it must relinquish authority to the appropriate domain.

Defining It Further

So, the centered mind is nevertheless still a semantic domain. It experiences awareness through our senses, but then builds an abstract representation, (a conceptual construct of the experience) using language symbols, in order to deal with and manage our actions and behavior associated with the experiences that are perceived. Where problems arise, is in the fact that we, that is, our unhealthy conscious mind, has the power to distort and or contaminate part or all of what we perceive.

This leads to the question as to where should we begin trying to make our systems healthy? But it almost certainly has to begin with the centered mind, because it will not distort the perceptions of our senses to begin with, thereby eliminating the issue of distorting our perceptions through selective filtering, and that is a big one. So, here's the short list of characteristics essential to the healthy centered mind:

Essentials

 

Operates in the present moment

 

Is calm, quiet and peaceful

 

Is constantly developing and improving critical thinking skills

 

Manages energy allocation to all four domains

 

Maintains detachment

 

Unbiased evaluation and decision making process

 

Understands the other three domains

 

Is responsible for the balanced, integrated functioning of the overall life form

Management

Management implies a certain level of organization. In the landscape of the mind or consciousness, organization requires self realization. That is, we cannot organize what we are not aware of, and being aware of ourselves is, sadly, not the most popular activity in the world. Now, we are not talking about our fantasy perceptions of ourselves, that image we have constructed that allows us to continue deceiving ourselves in order to avoid the actual truth. We are talking about a clear uncontaminated assessment of ourselves which these days is usually only achieved through a combination of long term meditation and many of the current self improvement techniques designed to help us adjust our behavior patterns such as affirmations, suggestions and visualizations.

But once we begin to see ourselves clearly, we are able to make the necessary adjustments and changes in order to become at peace with ourselves at last, and once that is achieved, we can begin to take control of our lives and explore our potential. And this begins with the centered mind's organizational ability. We can use a bizarre example for this; a variation on the multiple personality disorder. This condition in it's pure form is thought to be a coping response to some traumatic experience or event, however, we believe that almost all Humans today have a variation of this condition as a natural response to 1) self awareness and 2) the complexity of both our psychological, physical and social environment.
How these are perceived from one individual to another may differ greatly and this may include how they are identified. For example; some may identify these not as separate personalities at all, but as different moods or attitudes of one personality. We could even call these manifestations power centers, since they all require some degree of power in order to operate or function. They could also be perceived as dimensions of the mental domain. An example of such dimensions might be when we feel like being childlike or parental or serious or silly etc.

Top

Management (cont)

Whatever they are perceived as, the centered mind will simply recognize, classify and categorize them in order to organize and integrate them into the overall system. It will not apply value judgments on them such as good or bad.

This is part of self awareness and self acceptance and we realize how dysfunctional this might sound to those who are conditioned to believe that this has to be bad or dysfunctional behavior. However, another responsibility of the centered mind is to question our conditioned beliefs and make the appropriate adjustments where our conditioned reality or beliefs are either not supported by actual reality or simply based on unsupported assumptions. False beliefs, illusions etc.

Once identified, classified and categorized, the centered mind can begin to organize and integrate what it becomes aware of so that it can be managed appropriately. For example; when each dimension of the mental domain requires attention, the centered mind determines whether the time and place are appropriate and how much energy resources will be needed.

It seems to us that a strategy of embracing realities whose existence cannot be denied, such as these power centers or different personalities, is a better management decision than taking a course of action such as denying their existance, which can only be described as futile and will only produce frustration and conflict.

A healthy centered mind must be in harmony with the truth about itself and the environment it lives in. Otherwise we live a lie, in an environment of delusion and self deception.
Of course, there is much more to be said about the mental Human domain, but we cannot lose sight of our main goal here, which is a new definition for Human intelligence, and the mental Human is only one of four identified domains.

The Emotional Human

Again it is necessary for us to remember that we are looking at these Human characteristics as separate domains only as a strategy for achieving a deeper awareness and understanding of their unique strengths, weaknesses, capabilities and contributions to the whole integrated Human equation. This is important to remember for many reasons, not the least of which is that many of the professional disciplines associated with Human thought and behavior recognize the problem of dissociation, whereby the Human life form adopts a strategy of denial and avoidance that involves disassociating themselves with one or more of these domains or simply favoring one or more over the others. This condition is sometimes obvious where a person is all reason and intellect or a person is all emotional or all spiritual or all physical. In all such cases an imbalance is created that itself indicates areas of dysfunction in need of attention.

With that said, we take a look at the domain of the emotional human. Many people believe that this subject is a simple matter of left brain right brain considerations, but however much we might like it to be so, we always ask the question; in what area of investigating the Human life form have we found anything this simple? Yes, this smacks of black and white thinking. It is either mental or emotional, spiritual or physical, this or that. But of course the interaction between the mental Human and the emotional Human, and for that matter, the other domains as well, will not be simple by virtue of the very nature of the Human life form. The idea of having a creature of infinite power and capabilities built upon and supports by a simple rudimentary infrastructure just doesn't track. The Agenda of Life simply doesn't embrace the idea of something for nothing. Even the old idea of Nature couldn't abide such an idea.

Thoughts and Emotions

If we look back at the observations of the mental Human, we might notice the absents of concepts like passion, intensity, power, energy or insight, intuition and instincts. The mental Human was all about data in and data out, the processing of different kinds of information received from various sources. And one of those various sources will be our emotions. Our emotions are a consequence of our thoughts and our behavior can be a consequence of our emotions. It is impossible to separate the two in actual reality, we can dissociate ourselves from our emotions, that is, we can conceptually deny their existence when they become problematic, but the consequence of this is conflict and all that this kind of conflict implies. Such conflicts demand energy resources from other domains, not the least of which will be the physical domain.

For example; many Humans when they are young and have not had the time and experiences to develop their reasoning ability to the point where they can identify and manage their experiences, especially traumatic or strong emotional ones, will attempt to deal with such situations by somehow ignoring their feelings or turning off their emotions if they believe that they are the source of the pain, confusion, frustration etc. We cannot actually turn off our emotions, but we can dissociate ourselves from their effects.

Next